It’s silly to think that I’ve spent much of my third year at Quinnipiac wondering what to do with all my time. My roommates feel it too.
Usually, we turn on “Glee” for the third year in a row, only to stall out before season four. The curtain just drops somewhere in the middle and we don’t bother pulling it back up.
This year we’ve added reading into our routine. One roommate tore through “Verity” by Colleen Hoover, then we all swapped Frieda McFadden thrillers and romance novels. Reading feels better than endless TikTok scrolling, because at least we’re inside a real story and not a stitched-together montage.
But even reading has made me notice something that unsettles me: I still feel like I’m on a stage.
For so much of my life, and for many of us, we’ve been acting as students. Grades, GPA and assignments were all there to be perfected like delivering lines.
There is a structure with this, and it often gives people direction. With applause, you knew you were succeeding, and with a stern glare, you knew you were failing.
Now almost through my undergraduate degree, that script feels shakier.
I look around and realize the curtain is starting to fall on that old role. It offers a harder question for us all: What does success look like when no one is handing you a report card?
That’s not a question we’re trained to answer. From elementary school through college, success has been external, measurable. We chase the next test, the next grade and often the next milestone. Then, suddenly, you’re sitting in a dorm room with your roommates, trying to decide if rewatching “Glee” counts as “productive” or not.
Social media gives us a new stage to perform on. Day-in-the-life TikToks look like perfectly choreographed one-acts: the iced latte, the tote bag swinging just so, the cozy desk setup. They’re supposed to reassure us: this is success, look how put-together I am.
But watching them feels like sitting in the audience of a play. Beautiful, yes, but staged. And when I try to follow the script myself with the neat bed, the coffee in the nice mug and the perfect desk set up, I realize how fragile it is. One spilled coffee, one bad day and the whole performance cracks.
That’s the danger of living only for performance.
Whether it’s grades or aesthetics, it leaves no space for the days that don’t go as planned. When the curtain falls, you’re left staring at yourself, unsure of what role you’re supposed to play next.
So what does success look like offstage? Maybe it’s quieter than we expected. Maybe it’s the fact that my roommates and I can laugh our way through reruns, even if we never finish the series. Maybe it’s trading TikTok scrolls for Target’s selection of paperbacks. Maybe it’s learning to sit with the messy, ordinary days without trying to rewrite them into something more dramatic.
That doesn’t mean giving up ambition, because after all, we’re built on that here at Quinnipiac.
Letting go of the idea that growth has to be graded or rehearsed can bridge the gap from college to life when there is no syllabus or rubric.
If I’m honest, I think that’s the real fear so many of us carry here. We’ve spent most of our lives performing as students. We know how to succeed in that role. But when the curtain closes and the grades no longer define us, we’ll be left with the harder work of figuring out who we are without the script.
That moment isn’t failure. It’s the start of something else. We’re being given the chance to build our own definition of success, and it’s one that isn’t handed back to us with a number or a letter at the top.
And maybe the truth is that life offstage won’t always earn applause. But it will be real. And that’s the point.
